ghosting??

1. why do people call it ghosting? is it because of norton's ghost utility or was the term popular before that: the chicken or the egg?

2. are ghosting, hard drive imaging, volume copy, etc. different terms for the same thing or are they different somehow?

3. whats a good free utility that i can use to make these images, i expect norton charges for theirs. im trying to make hard drive images of my two hard drives(i dual boot windows and linux) and put them on rescue boots disc kind of thing. of course the drives will only have the basic install on an os on them when i make the images, i plan on backing up all my big files up somewhere else.

http://www.just****inggoogleit.com/

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of course the drives will only have the basic install on an os on them when i make the images, i plan on backing up all my big files up somewhere else.

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Why ? :confused:
Ghost is perfectly capable of imaging the whole thing, and, if I remember right, it will ONLY image the whole drive ????

http://www.just****inggoogleit.com/

New And Improved Link! Now With Easter Egg'd Google Links!

well, i think the images would be to big to fit on a cd if i put all my anime and games on them ;)
also, i could google stuff like that but it's easier to ask here and more reliable. im mostly just looking for an alternative to buying ghost, if somebody could answer my other questions, that would be cool. a search like "what is" +ghosting brings up all sorts of wierd stuff on google, photography, supernatural stuff, not much system backup tho

I stuck another 40GB HDD into the box, and image to that on a monthly basis. [Win2KPro and XPPro]
backups on CD done weekly for 'my docs'.

What is it with saving pron ?
You've seen one t!t.
You've seen 'em both :D

who said anything about porn? get your mind out of the gutter ;)

Yah eh? I save my pr0n on cd too nowadays. Heaven only knows how many gigs of pics I have now... let alone vids... I swear I'm gonna start an fserve channel in irc....

[edit] oh yah - Fox - no two breasticles are alike. [/edit]

can somebody plz just answer my questions? i cant find answers on google

Can't find or too lazy to sift through? You already said you asked first here because we were more reliable... Duly chided, you shall now receive your answers:

1. It's from Norton Ghost. Since everyone who was anyone way back when ran Norton Utilities and later on Norton Systemworks, the term 'Ghost' and 'Ghosting' became widespread for the imaging of a drive. I'm pretty sure Peter Norton could tell you how he got the idea for Ghost from 'Ghost in the Machine', but I'm also sure he probably won't since you don't have access to him, and you're trying to get out of buying his product.

2. They're a bit different - Ghosting a drive is creating an exact copy of it. A 'ghost image' can be reloaded onto a machine and all the settings and configurations, all accessory software, and all files on that disk at the time the image was taken will be reinstalled and *nothing* else will be on the drive. This term Ghosting is synonomous with hard drive imaging, but it differs from volume copy in that volume copy deals with files and some settings only, not the entire picture including OS and system files like Ghost does.

3. If there's a free Ghosting utility out there I don't know of it nor am I inclined to look on your behalf - I leave this as an exercise to the *lazy* student. Go google it for yourself. If you can't find it, odds are there isn't one.

thanx alot blackice :D. just curious, what types of hard drive imaging methods are there besides ghosting and volume copy? you can just give me the names, ill google them myself ;)

now that's getting into the rediculous side again. just google 'disk imaging' or 'volume imaging' like I would. To find softwares, google 'disk imaging software' - might even add 'download' to the key terms to tighten it a bit. Learn to use Google. Google is your friend. Quit asking me to do it for you.

In other words:

www.just****inggoogleit.com

im really starting to hate that site ;)

Hey Hey,

Here's an example of a waste of a lot of space... the thread had the potential to be somewhat informative and there's now three posts with links to justf@#$inggoogleit.com... that's a little ridiculous...

As for software alternatives to ghost..

Microsoft Remote Installation Services (RIS) - If you don't want to pay for Norton Ghost, you won't want to pay for this - http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/risover.mspx

Ghost for Linux - Free... not just for linux...Named so because it's linux based... - http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l

g4u (ghost 4 Unix) - Free... again not just for unix.... - http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

Anyways..

Peace,
HT

thanx alot htregz. i didnt think my questions were that dumb :) i knew there had to be some free alternatives out there(i couldnt believe that the open source community didnt have their own ghosting prog).

i looked around and found a few more, drvimagerxp, driveclonerxp and a few others, but i dont see anything that allows you to create a rescue disc that will format your drive and unpack the drive image.

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Originally posted here by slinky2004
i looked around and found a few more, drvimagerxp, driveclonerxp and a few others, but i dont see anything that allows you to create a rescue disc that will format your drive and unpack the drive image.

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Hey Hey,

You want a custom disc with your image for free??? You'd better start working on it yourself.

Also you don't need to format first.. if you're putting a new image over top.. that would be pointless.

1. Take g4l or g4u and look at their guts.
2. Take their image extraction portions and put on a bootable CD/DVD that's running an ftp.
3. Create a simple script that runs on boots and calls the extraction program.

Boom! you have a CD/DVD that is your own rescue disk.

Peace,
HT

ill try that, i was just expecting that it would format because i have this other rescue disk that comes up with ghost and formats the drive and slaps the new image onto it, i wanted to make my own one of those. when you say "Look at their guts" do you mean hacking up their source code? i dunno if i can handle that

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when you say "Look at their guts" do you mean hacking up their source code? i dunno if i can handle that

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I'm pretty sure g4l and g4u are open source - no need to hack into it.

well, thats not what i mean, i just dont think i'll have much luck messing with their soruce code. i dont expect i'll be able to find the "image extraction portions" easily and even if i did i have no idea how to compile something thats supposed to be an iso image.

i think im gonna go with g4u, it looks like g4l is a bs copy of g4u, then again the g4u guy could just be being a jerk, i cant really tell if his arguments are valid... http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4l